RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/14/inflations-here-getting-worse-and-may-even-last-longer-than-covid-19-pandemic/

Both the out-of-touch Biden administration and our betters at the Federal Reserve Board continue to assert that inflation’s no big thing. They’re right. It’s not, unless you work for a living. Then it’s a very big thing indeed.

We were told by all the best “experts” that inflation is ephemeral, a mere blip. The Fed keeps telling us the recent jump in prices is “transient.” Democrats and many of their media friends continue to insist it’s not an issue. Just keep spending, they say. Stimulus!

But calling the recent burst in inflation “transient” or any other such euphemism to suggest it’s like a brief summer cold is not exactly accurate. In fact, it’s wrong.

The recent surge in inflation isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. Indeed, it’s even worse than the numbers now indicate.

In the most recent Consumer Price Index data, year-over-year inflation hit a tad above 5%. That’s the biggest spurt since 2008. In April, it hit 3.6%, nearly twice the recent average. Meanwhile, core prices (excluding volatile food and energy) are rising at their highest pace since 1992, when then-Fed chief Alan Greenspan was forced to nearly double interest rates to kill what many feared would be a bad bout of inflation.

This is no coincidence. In May, real average hourly earnings fell 2.8%, even as employees worked more hours. Let that sink in: Those earning an hourly wage actually took home less pay for working more.

As inflation rises, real wages — that is, earnings adjusted for inflation — inevitably go down. Just as in the 1970s, low-skilled, less-trained and less-schooled workers can’t keep up. Their wages fall behind. That’s the real danger here.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/news-flash-trump-was-right_3857177.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=RCP

On Saturday, June 12, former President Donald Trump released a statement that, in tone, will have his opponents rolling their eyes.

“I told you so,” they will say, because Donald Trump told them so and managed to get in a bit of signature Trump braggadocio along the way.

Under the legend “Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America,” this is what he wrote:

“Have you noticed that they are now admitting I was right about everything they lied about before the election?”

“They” of course are the eye-rollers, not only those the former President delighted in calling dispensers of “fake news” but also their clients, toadies, and enablers.

Not for the first time, I wonder whether they all are readers of “Pride and Prejudice.”

I am thinking of that passage towards the end of the novel where Lizzy confesses her love for Mr. Darcy to her sister Jane.

Jane is horrified. “Oh, Lizzy! It cannot be. I know how much you dislike him.”

“That is all to be forgot,” Lizzy replies. “In such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable. This is that last time I shall ever remember it myself.”

So it is with the reporters at CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Politico, the entire Democratic side of Congress, not to mention woke members of our intelligence services, the DOJ, military men with a rank of colonel or higher, members of any teacher’s union and of course anyone who has been graduated from or teaches at any Ivy or near-Ivy institution of so-called higher education, not to mention the NeverTrump sorority and time-servers in HR departments across the country.

To save time, let’s call this wretched multitude The Committee.

The Committee said one thing then, when Donald Trump was president.

They say something contradictory now, claiming—or in the case of Joe Biden, really—to have forgotten what they said when their bête orange was in office.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/13/reflections-on-the-digital-revolution/

The problems and challenges posed by what is often referred to as “Big Tech” should primarily be understood as novel instantiations of age-old issues. Power, whether political, cultural, or economic, tends to concentrate over time unless that concentration is disrupted by an outside force that favors or forces dispersion.

This is readily apparent across nearly every segment of the American economy today. Every major industry and thus every labor market is dominated by what are effectively cartels: chemicals, airlines, steel, automobiles, health care, and so forth. This creates all kinds of undesirable byproducts, but nowhere is the effect more pronounced and the outcomes more anti-social than those created by Big Tech—especially the FAANG companies. These are Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google. I’d also include Twitter for our purposes because of the outsized role it plays as a platform for public discourse. It’s noteworthy that Microsoft is not included: it may be larger than Facebook, but is clearly less powerful.

That fact is critical to understanding the nature of the problem America faces. Part of the problem is bigness itself, but the more significant issue is the power that the large tech companies exert by controlling access to critical technology, infrastructure, customers, or people. The network effects that make these companies powerful also create a natural defense against competition. That’s a fantastic business proposition, but it can be bad for the country. And that’s where we find ourselves today. The power wielded by these companies undermines what Oren Cass describes as “the basic assumptions on which our market, our democracy, and our society have relied.”

The solutions to the problems created by the digital revolution are perhaps not simple, but they are less complex than they may seem once we understand the problems clearly. While the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which already prohibits anti-competitive behavior, should be applied—and updated if necessary—to Big Tech companies, that is only a partial solution. The bigger issue is that these companies abuse the essential political rights of all Americans by regulating political speech. This is where both our thinking and the law need upgrades. The scale of these companies and the essential role they play as platforms for political speech mean that they must be regulated in order to protect and promote that speech. Arguments that Facebook and Google are analogous to small, local bakeries because they are both non-state-owned companies are facile, untrue, and disingenuous. They don’t have anything like the same amount of power and they don’t play the same role in the lives of their customers or the country.

/https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/13/anatomy-of-the-woke-madness/

Wokeism has become our most popular secular religion—at least for a moment dethroning climate change. It reduces all of the past and present into puerile binaries between “whites” and “non-whites.”

Its aim is for the present generation to rewrite our history—whether by The 1619 Project and cancel culture or iconoclastic statue-toppling and Trotskyization of names and places. Wokeism becomes a child’s morality tale of noble non-white victims versus villainous white victimizers. Erasing the past and its language supposedly fuels a recalibration of the future, all in the here and now, a holy Year Zero

In the process, wokeism has done a lot of damage to America, and will do even more if left unchecked. Here are its chief characteristics.

Elites vs. Elites

First, remember that wokeism is a top-down phenomenon. It started in academia with “critical race theory” and “critical legal theory.” These are bastard offshoots of harebrained “critical theory,” which arose from a demoralized and adrift Europe after the cataclysms of two devastating European-spawned world wars.

These ‘theories” are merely adolescent delusions that norms, customs, traditions, laws, and rules are just arbitrary “constructs.” Thus they should have no authority over those whom they “oppress.” These relativist props are the tools of the white male hierarchy to gain and consolidate their “power.” So they can only be resisted by rejecting all these insidious “norms,” whether  the canons of physics and math, jurisprudence, standardized test scores, or the idea that police keep the “peace.”

Outside of the campus, the media, the entertainment industry, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, thousands of rank-and-file social justice warrior demonstrators are not demanding, for example, to enroll women in Special Forces combat units. Grassroots America does not insist on subsidized transgendered surgeries.

Instead, leftist Washington politicos and bureaucrats pressure the Pentagon brass, in quid pro quo fashion. The subtext is that those who promote woke policies are assured of promotion and future exemption from audit of lucrative retirement consulting for defense-related corporations.

The people⁠—that is, 51 percent of America—is not organizing for more cancel-culture censorship on Facebook, or even greater percentages of college admissions determined largely by race. Inner-city residents are not clamoring for less police patrolling. Defunding law enforcement is an elite obsession of those who do not live in insecure places.

Whether in the corporate boardroom or in Hollywood casting meetings or in the campus president’s office, race-based obsessions mostly reflect intramural wars between elites for the lucrative spoils of the one-percent’s news anchorships, roles in TV shows and commercials, diversity deanships, and admissions quotas to the Ivy League.

As a result, class considerations have vanished. They are replaced by absurd racial reductionism. For example, CNN mediocrity Don Lemon, by virtue of his race-mongering, can pose as a multimillionaire victim. The anonymous white deplorables at Walmart, caricatured as smelly in the Lisa Page-Peter Strozk text trove, are his proverbial anonymous oppressors.